Whenever I pick up a book, I like to read every portion—front-matter, back-matter, copyright page, everything—before I actually get into the book. When reading to a bilingual kindergarten class while in the library, however, I generally just grab the first on-theme English book I see and go at it. For this reason, I was a bit surprised to find after finishing this book that the whole Harry series is produced by two men.

Little Harry is a boy, sure, but he lives with his sister, mother, and grandmother with not a single male influence around him. Am I the only person that’s asking, “Where’s the dad?” Why is it that, like in nearly every TV show produced since the year 2000, no popular “normal” family can have a complete set of parents who un-divorced, happily married, and—I now have to add—of the same gender? If there’s ever a man and a woman who have parented a child in our popular entertainment, they’re either happily unmarried or having an affair, or the dad’s either in jail or a raving idiot. Boy what I wouldn’t give to have a fact-checker help me out with the statistics on this! Where are all the fathers!?

I don’t intend to destroy any illusions children might have about this series, whose stories are generally pleasant, but I have to write in honesty. While I understand that many children don’t come from happy, unbroken homes, I also don’t understand why portraying such healthy relationships can in some way destroy that child’s self-esteem. Aren’t we doing the children of happily married, straight parents a disservice by telling them, “Your parents are unnatural, because they love each other and they are still married. Give it a year and they’ll separate. Don’t worry! You’ll be a normal kid from a broken family like everyone else soon enough 🙂 ”

I am so sick and tired of this culture’s insistence upon making good evil and evil good. Romans 1 is alive and well today, my friends. Perhaps Ian and Adrian don’t deserve this type of review, and perhaps Harry’s dad was killed in a war somewhere, but that’s just not the message I’m receiving. I’m receiving a message that says, “Harry doesn’t need a father, and neither do you.” I can’t agree with that, and I’m going to call such perverted brainwashing when I see it.